1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an image storage system for accumulating and storing customer's image information transferred over a communication line. This invention also relates to an image accumulation apparatus for accumulating customer's image information transferred over a communication line.
2. Description of the Related Art
Hitherto, image information provided by taking a photograph by an image input machine such as a digital camera has been transferred from internal memory of the image input machine to a personal computer of the user and recorded on a large-capacity record medium such as a hard disk or a CD-R for retention. If a hard copy is required, hard copy output has been produced on a printer connected to the personal computer or the user has brought the record medium into a shop or has used a network to provide the image information and has made a print request. However, to retain the image information in the personal computer, there has been the cost of providing a large-capacity record medium and it has taken time in managing the image information. For the user to print for himself or herself, there have also been the disadvantages that it takes cost and time in providing a printer and paper and that operation is not easy.
Recently, service has been designed for making it possible for a trader to operate an image accumulation server, for a customer to transfer image information from his or her personal computer or a terminal, etc., installed in a shop, etc., to the server, to accumulate the image information in the server, and perform image processing, print, etc.
In the image accumulation service system as described above, to allocate a record area for each customer and retain image information, if an attempt is made to reserve a given amount of record area at the user registration time of the customer as a general Internet service provider allocates a storage area of home page and electronic mail data to each user, an unused area in which the customer does not retain data occurs because not all customers maximize the use of allocated record areas. In such a case, the unused areas in the server are wasted and the customer pays usage charge containing the unused area regardless of the actually retained data amount; on the other hand, for the trader, the use efficiency of the record areas in the server worsens. Thus, there is a problem of impossibility of appropriately managing the storage areas and customer information in response to the application, purpose, use situation, etc., of the customer.
Furthermore, for example, image information of images photographed by digital cameras differs in image data resolution (the number of pixels) because the digital cameras differ in the number of pixels of the image pickup device, photographing mode, etc., and the data amount per image may vary largely. Thus, in the image accumulation service system as described above, the necessary capacity of the record area to be provided by the server varies depending on the resolution of the image data transferred from the user. If an attempt is made to reserve a given amount of record area in the server, the number of images that can be retained varies depending on the resolution of the image data, and the record area is insufficient for the number of retained images, required by the user (the capacity is exceeded); in contrast, the record area becomes drastically surplus. This point is a problem.